The Civilian Senior Leader Management Office visited Area IV to give a presentation about Senior Enterprise Talent Management and Enterprise Talent Management programs on Mar. 2. They informed Army Civilians about the opportunities they have as Department of Defense Civilians and showed the roadmap to becoming a member of the Senior Executive Service.

"SETM and ETM programs fall under the CSLMO, which were the representatives here today from the Pentagon, which stands for the Civilian Senior Leader Management Office. This program is all about Civilians developing themselves for GS-14, 15 and becoming a SES," said Area IV Civilian Personnel Advisory Center Director Marcella Griffin. "It is not only for Army development but DoD, so you could possibly be an SES. It gives you the opportunity to go to various other schools such as Command and General Staff College, possibly the Army War College or Naval War College, so you can build on your educational experiences as well."

She also mentioned the program is not only for Civilians, but also for officers from lieutenant colonel and above.

The CSLMO team walked everybody through the application process. Army Civilians must volunteer and apply via the SETM automated system. Commands or organizations will conduct selection board and submit their Order of Merit List to CSLMO. Then Headquarters, Department of the Army Board members individually assess and assign utilization ratings to each applications and selects the candidates who will proceed. The board will interview these people and establish their OML. The last phase is the Board deciding where to put the program graduates based on Commands or organizations' input, needs of the Army and candidates' requests.

There are many programs available under SETM and ETM, including a couple at other locations.

"One program is like a temporary assignment where you can go for a Temporary Duty for 189 days to another area where your mentor is going to be a person who is an SES, so you can see what the world looks like in becoming an SES," said Griffin. "That's where they also talked about the TDY being paid at 55 percent based on the regulation.

"The CSLMO Team also listed websites where you can go on and look for positions that are coming up for the May timeframe for the selection or the December timeframe, so that they can go in and start submitting packets," said Griffin.

If an individual wants to apply, they want to ensure that they send forward the complete packet and what the packet has to look like so that the packages are not returned back to them time after time again.

"The resume and what they call Executive Core Qualifications identifies what you have done based on the particular criteria at the executive level," said Griffin. "So all that information has to be submitted in the packet and was detailed out in the slide presentation. The team gave some tips, for example to write 'I' instead of 'We as a team.' They want to know what you did as an individual."

"Right now we have what we call an aging workforce," said Griffin. "There are a lot of individuals that are leaving the government because they reached retirement age. We have to be able to replenish those positions with qualified individuals. So that's why this program is very important."